On Monday, California State Senator Henry Stern, D- Canoga Park, spoke on Facebook Live about a newly-proposed bill on nursing home reform affecting those in and around the Santa Clarita Valley.
New legislation for nursing home management reform, known as Senate Bill (SB) 650, was spoken about on Facebook Live by Senator Stern this week.
“The way we’ve built our healthcare system has led to a dynamic where the vast majority of skilled nursing facilities in California are for-profit and privately run,” Stern said. “What we’ve found from both L.A. County’s audit, from state oversight, from investigative journalism, and we’ve seen some incredible reports, is that the corporate side of this industry, the larger for-profit institutions, are transacting in the billions, not the millions.”
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The Senator spoke on the reportedly hidden sides of skilled nursing homes in the state of California.
“Those transactions between related parties total multiple billions of dollars in any given year, and we have very little idea about whether those transactions are actually being taken in a way that is fair, that prices aren’t being inflated, that money isn’t being wasted or that profits aren’t being unjustly pocketed,” Stern said.
SB 650 co-sponsor Tony Chicotel, staff attorney for California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, was invited to speak on the bill.
“Senator Stern’s SB 650 addresses one of the most important and vexing nursing home problems: financial transparency,” Chicotel said. “Hiding profits enables the industry to come back to the legislature every few years and successfully ask for more money. The industry capitalizes on an asymmetry of information. The nursing homes know their costs, they know their profits, and the state simply doesn’t.”
Senator Stern then went into the focus of his reported new budget, as well as the concerns SB 650 is slated to address.
“We’re going to be spending billions and billions more dollars to make sure our caregivers are taken care of, so they can do their jobs, that there’s adequate staffing, and that people in our nursing facilities are treated like human beings and not like hogs on a profit and loss sheet,” Stern said.
More information on the facets of SB 650, in addition to the bill’s text, is available here.
“I’m really hopeful and insistent, frankly, that we get this legislation done this year,” Stern said. “I do not believe this is an issue that can wait.”
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